Lyle asked me where $3,180 of the feed store's money had gone on the same night I found the buyer's offer he'd hidden in his truck for three weeks.
He asked it at our kitchen table on County Road 214, with a stapled report squared in front of him and his cap turning in his hands. "Eleven cash refunds, Dee. Since July. All under your code."
I picked up the report. Winona had printed it for him, the same monthly summary she ran every month, my code 0827 down the left side and a dollar figure beside each line.
"I didn't ring those," I said.
"It's your code."
"It's our anniversary. Half of Lometa Springs could guess it." I set the page down. "I'll tell you what. I've run that drawer for twenty-one years, and I've never been a dollar off that I didn't find by Friday."
"I hear you," he said. That meant he hadn't decided, and it was worse than shouting. He said the August deposits had come in about $1,600 under last August's, and that was why he'd asked Winona for the report.
I couldn't sit there. "Where's the gate remote?"
"Visor."
It wasn't on the visor. The truck was ticking in the dark yard, the cicadas still going in the live oaks, and I opened the glove box looking for the remote and found a tire gauge, a manual, and a co-op envelope.
Inside was a letter offering $385,000 for the building, the lot and the inventory of Marchbanks Feed & Ranch Supply, answer due October 9. A business card was clipped to it. On the back, in block capitals I knew from a hundred delivery tickets, was CODY and his cell number.
I carried it in and laid it next to the refund report.
Lyle looked at it a long while. "Three weeks," he said. "Cody set up the meeting in Lampasas. I didn't tell you because you'd say no."
"You're right, I would."
"It's mine to sell."
"I know whose it is. You hid this from me and you're asking where I hid money?"
"That's a different matter," he said, clipped and formal, the way he got when he was cornered. I slept on the couch with the ceiling fan turning and did not sleep.
Four days later Marisol pulled in on four new tires. She was out of her car before the engine settled, laughing, telling Winona and me that her grandpa had given her $720 for her birthday and she'd paid cash at the tire place on the highway and the man had thrown in the balancing.
"Good for you, hon," Winona said. She was already humming over the drawer. When I left at four she'd put a slice of her peach cobbler in foil beside my keys.
I thought about those cash tires more than I wanted to.
The next Tuesday at noon, a rancher stood at my counter with two fifty-pound sacks of range cubes on the dolly when Lyle walked in, still in his co-op work shirt. Cody came in behind him for his paycheck, jingling the carabiner of keys at his belt.
Lyle reached past me and punched the register keys. "Codes are changed," he said. "Dee, you're off the register and off the deposits until this gets sorted."
"Lyle."
"I hear you." He took the deposit bag from under the counter and handed it to Cody. "Run that to the bank, would you?"
He told Winona and Marisol the co-op had made an offer on the store and that he was considering it. Cody grinned around the room. "Y'all don't worry, Sis. The co-op will keep everybody on. I got that straight from the man."
The rancher paid with a twenty and wouldn't look at me. By supper the whole feed line at church would know the owner's wife couldn't be trusted with the money. Marisol took her cap off and put it back on and went very still and polite. Winona touched my sleeve and said, "Come on back, hon, I've got a Dr Pepper in the closet."
A week later, at supper, Lyle said he meant to sign the letter by October 9. "Friday the ninth. I'll come in at ten and fax it from the back office."
"Then I'll be at Mama's," I said.
He nodded at his plate. I packed one suitcase and drove to Pecan Street, half a mile from the store, where my mother's two-bedroom house had sat empty since the funeral.
Winona came after she closed up, carrying boxes from my trunk without being told where they went. She had a set of sheets under her arm, line-dried, smelling of fabric softener. "Nobody sleeps on a bare mattress in this house," she said, and she made up Mama's bed with the corners tucked tight.
I stood in the doorway of the room I'd grown up in and said thank you. It came out thin.
That Thursday, before Marisol left at four, I caught her in the supply closet in the back office, taking down her gloves. "Marisol, did you ever use the sticky-note code for anything besides voids?"
"No, ma'am."
"And those tires. Paid in cash."
She went still. "My grandpa gave me that money. I can show you the card he wrote." Her braid had come over her shoulder, and she pushed it back. "I'd like to give my two weeks, Mrs. Marchbanks."
"Marisol, I didn't mean—"
"Yes, ma'am. You did." She walked out with her gloves in her back pocket. I stood among the feed-company calendars with my face hot, having accused a girl I had trained myself.
The following Monday I closed, then took the July, August and September journal rolls from the shoebox in the office closet to Mama's kitchen table. The register prints every transaction on a paper roll, with the time. I change the roll monthly and file them myself, and nobody else had ever opened that box.
I meant to check them against Cody's dock nights. He loaded the truck Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings, he had a back-door key, and he knew my code. I had a legal pad and a pencil and the yellow light over Mama's table.
I found the first refund under 0827 on July 7. Then the next, and the next.
Eleven. Each one was timed between 5:40 and 6:00 in the evening. I wrote the weekdays down the side of the pad, and the same three kept coming back, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Not one fell on a Monday, a Wednesday or a Friday.
The biggest was $640, rung at 5:52 p.m. on August 27. At 5:52 that night I'd been in Marble Falls, twenty-five miles away, across a candle from Lyle at our anniversary dinner, sawing at a chicken-fried steak while he talked about a lot on Lake Buchanan and I was happy.
Marisol had left at four for her class in Burnet that day, and she left at four every shift. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, after four, there was one person in that store with the drawer.
I washed a glass that was already clean. I slept, if you call it that, on sheets that smelled like somebody else's clothesline.
On Thursday I went back to the store at ten minutes to six. The sign said Open until the last customer's truck pulled out, and then the lot was empty. Winona was counting the drawer under half the lights, humming something old. I knocked on the glass, and she let me in and locked the door behind me.
"Hon, you forget something?"
"I did." I set the three rolls on the counter. "I've been through July, August and September. Eleven refunds under my code, Winona, and every one rung in the last twenty minutes of your night. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. None on Cody's dock nights."
She didn't touch them. I said, "The $640 one was rung at 5:52 on August 27. I was sitting across from Lyle in Marble Falls. I'm sleeping in my dead mother's bed. My husband thinks I'm a thief, and I made a twenty-two-year-old cry over four tires."
Her hand had stopped on the stack of ones. "Who else has seen these?"
"Nobody yet."
The compressor on the cold drink case kicked on behind her. She breathed out and her face rearranged itself, warm again. "Hon, those registers lose time. You know that. Cody's got a key to the back door. And that code was taped in the drawer where anybody could read it."
"The clock's off, and it's Cody, and it's the sticky note. All three, and always on your nights."
She wrapped a rubber band around the ones and set them down. "You stuck it there for the world to see." She said it kindly, which was the worst of it. "And Lyle's selling anyway, Delia. You've got a lineman's pension coming. I've got a house note."
I waited. She said, "I'll put the $3,180 back. Quiet, a little at a time, and we call it a drawer error. Nobody has to know a thing, and you don't have to be the one who ruins it for everybody."
"No."
"Delia."
"Lyle comes in at ten tomorrow to sign that letter," I said. "When he does, you tell him, Winona, or I will." I gathered up the rolls, and she stood there with the ones in her hand and did not hum.
I flipped the sign to Back in 15 Minutes at ten the next morning. Lyle's pickup was already at the curb. He came in with his cap in one hand and the letter of intent in the other, and Marisol, serving out her notice, stood at the end of the counter with her arms folded. Winona stood by the register. She hadn't said a word.
Lyle laid the letter beside the register and uncapped a pen. "Let's get this faxed."
"Hold on," I said. "I'll tell you what, Lyle."
I unrolled the August journal next to the letter and put my finger on one line. "5:52 p.m., August 27, $640 cash refund under my code. You know where we were at 5:52 that night. You had your hand around a glass of iced tea and you were telling me about a lot on Lake Buchanan."
Lyle looked at the line. Then at me.
"Every refund under my code was rung between 5:40 and 6:00 on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday," I said. "I'll say the rest, because it's mine to say. Two years ago I wrote my code on a sticky note and stuck it inside the cash drawer, so Marisol could run voids when I was busy. Anybody who opened that drawer could read it. That's on me." I turned. "And Marisol, I was wrong to accuse you. You were gone by four. You were always gone by four."
Marisol said nothing and kept her arms folded, but she looked at me.
"The tape could be wrong," Winona said.
"Winona made up my bed at Mama's with her own sheets," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I wanted. "And she let me sleep on them, knowing. I'm not calling anybody. I want Lyle to hear it from somebody besides his wife."
Nobody moved. A feed truck went by on State Highway 29, and the windows hummed.
"The house note's two months behind," Winona said, to the counter. "My husband's hours at the quarry got cut in the spring. I meant to put it back before the quarter ended. I let it land on you, Delia, because I told myself they don't fire the wife." She wiped under one eye with a knuckle. "Fourteen years I've been here. And he doesn't know yet. He will tonight."
Lyle took a sheet of store letterhead from under the counter and wrote on it for a long moment. He read it out: $3,180, repaid at $265 a month for twelve months. Winona signed it with the store pen. She unhooked a brass key from her ring and set it on the counter, and then she walked to the back office to clear her drawer. The door shut softly.
I looked at my husband. "You can sell it, Lyle. The law says it's yours and I can't stop you. But you'll do it knowing I never took a dime, and I won't be behind this counter Monday."
He picked up the letter of intent and turned it over. He wrote *Declined. L. Marchbanks* across the back, crossed to the back office, and I heard the old fax machine take it in and push it down the line. When he came out his ears were red.
"That lot was the first thing I'd wanted for myself in twenty years," he said. "Cody's job goes with it. And I believed a printed page over you." He knelt at the safe, took out the deposit bag, and put it in my hands. "I hear you now, Dee."
Marisol had unfolded her arms. "I took the job at the animal clinic, ma'am," she said. "I'm keeping my notice."
"I'd have taken it too," I said.
At six I locked the front door and stood in the doorway with the lights off behind me. I had two keys on my ring, the farmhouse's and the one to Mama's house on Pecan Street. The cool front had come through that afternoon, and the first breath of it lifted the hair at my neck.
Lyle's truck sat under the parking-lot light with the engine running. He had leaned across and pushed the passenger door open an inch, and the glove box hung open and empty.
"Come home, Dee," he said through the gap.
I stood there with a key in each hand and did not move yet.
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